This article was originally featured on MIT Press.
There may be nothing unnatural in nature, but nature still encompasses much that seems fantastically strange—the amazingly multifarious sex lives of animals, for example. Emmanuelle Pouydebat’s “Sexus Animalis,” from which the following text is excerpted, tells us everything we never dreamed we wanted to know about the reproductive systems, genital organs, and sexual practices of animals, from elephants (who masturbate with their trunks) to fruit flies (who produce spermatozoa 20 times their size) to bark lice (whose females penetrate the males—see below). In the animal kingdom we find heterosexual, lesbian, gay, and bisexual behavior, as well as monogamy, polygamy, and polyandry, not to mention fellatio and many varieties of erections and orgasms.
Pouydebat, a natural history researcher, tells us about gutter penises, double penises, detachable penises, and corkscrew-shaped penises, as well as vaginas built for storage and clitorises with thorns. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, there’s more data about animal penises than animal vaginas and clitorises.) She explains how the ostrich achieves an erection, describes the courtship of pygmy chameleons, and recounts how the female short-beaked echidna chooses a partner. Indeed, “over the course of this book, human organs and sexuality come to look pretty humdrum,” writes Pouydebat. “The animal world has beat us on every score.”
BARKLICE (neotrogla sp.)
We’ve already seen how females of Nicrophorus vespilloides chemically castrate males to make them monogamous. The barklice of the Neotrogla genus use an even more radical strategy. And you thought it couldn’t be done.
These barklice are tiny flies about three millimeters long. They live in dry caves in Brazil, where they seem to feed on guano and bat carcasses. Nothing very exceptional. But here it comes. This is a unique case (who…
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